Hand Models – Tennis Skirt
Genre: Punk, Post-Punk, Garage Rock
There is very little genuinely angry music on the charts these days. It only makes sense. What are you buying when you’re angry? Indeed, none of the things that can be advertised by the folks asked to sing the songs that make it onto the charts. Don’t expect things to get better, either. The pop charts aren’t about representation, they’re all about advertising and product placement.
Still, the energy, negative as well as positive, that swells in people living in cities, trying to get by, looking for a release, does get represented. The only issue is that if you don’t look very carefully, you won’t find it. This is not music that is often advertised in the shop window or in between new episodes of the new, hot reality TV show.
Hand Models’ Tennis Skirt is music seemingly created by kids who spend their days hiding away and observing how life goes on around them and using this kind of spikey indie-rock as their escape. It’s a tune as shaky as Alex Turner’s writing hand after all too many cups of coffee. This is music made by life’s observers who have also learned to play a six-string.
Ben DeHan – The Dream
Genre: Pop Punk, Emo, Alternative Rock
Similar artists: The Dangerous Summer, Blink 182, State Champs, Magnolia Park, Weezer, Nirvana, Machine Gun Kelly
Modern music has always been about representation. Classical music didn’t lose out on potential fans just because of the fact that tunes were complicated or, usually, seemed to drag on forever. The real problem was that few kids could actually relate in any meaningful way to classical composers.
And so, we all depend on our pop stars to tell us the things that we already know and let us believe that what they might achieve is something that may come to pass for us as well. It is, in fact, a really positive exchange. In a world where social connections are getting fewer and shallower, pop stars are busy working as their own personal therapists/friends.
Ben DeHan’s The Dream is a song meant to speak directly to the new generation of pop-punk kids that have found a real connection with guitar music once again. It’s a song of hope and of despair, a tune that captures the conflicting emotions of life as a teenager. Yes, the vocals are a bit buried under layers of effects, and you might have heard these melodies in MGK songs. But, it’s a tune with its heart in the right place, even if the singer doesn’t quite know it yet.
